Deconstructing FAT
Doris Allhutter, Bettina Berendt · 2020
Research in fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAT) in socio-technical systems needs to take into account how practices of computing are entrenched with power relations in complex and multi-layered ways. Trying to disentangle the way in which structural discrimination and normative computational concepts and methods are intertwined, this frequently raises the question of WHO are the actors that shape technologies and research agendas---who gets to speak and to define bias, (un)fairness, and discrimination? "Deconstructing FAT" is a CRAFT workshop that aims at complicating this question by asking how "we" as researchers in FAT (often unknowingly) mobilize implicit assumptions, values and beliefs that reflect our own embeddedness in power relations, our disciplinary ways of thinking, and our historically, locally, and culturally-informed ways of solving computational problems or approaching our research. This is a vantage point to make visible and analyze the normativity of technical approaches, concepts and methods that are part of the repertoire of FAT research. Inspired by a previous international workshop [1], this CRAFT workshop engages an interdisciplinary panel of FAT researchers in a deconstruction exercise that traces the following issues: